Reviews of Gattaca and The French Connection

A foray into film criticism

I recently watched two films, “Gattaca” and “The French Connection”, and felt that I had something to say about both of them. This blog is not a film review blog – at least not often – so in spite of their total dissimilarity, I lump them both together.

Gattaca is about a society obsessed with caste. Supposedly, it is about gene editing, but that is not what it is truly about. Gene editing would be a way of improving the potential of people, but what matters ultimately is how people turn out, environment included. That people hold onto the prejudice, even after our protagonist turns out to be every bit the equal of the genetically edited, is ignored. The film makers are quite careful not to implicate American racial politics – this is explicitly not a society divided on basis of race, and people of all races are prominently featured in positions of authority throughout the film – but the same prejudicial instinct is there.

I felt that the film makers hadn’t the slightest clue what people would do in the future. They really hadn’t thought that far – the script seemed to call for people doing job-like activities, to be decided later, and by the time they got to filming they still hadn’t decided. So we get the somewhat absurd spectacle of astronauts obsessively planning out their own flight plans. The jobs are not the point, of course – they just need to have people around to make them have a plot – but it is an indication that we should not take them as a guide to the future.

Fighting with the movie on the grounds that the castelike society is unrealistic is silly. Every film – all narrative art, really – starts by showing the rules of the world. They create a certain set of conditions. A bad film fails because when it violates the implications of those conditions, it removes the stakes from the world. We are interested when there is cause and effect, but not when there are arbitrary, unconnected images and sounds. So, to give two examples within the same series, “The Fellowship of the Ring” succeeds because the power of its heroes is sharply bounded. What magic there is explicitly miraculous, and not to be relied upon. By contrast, “The Return of the Kings” fails as a movie, because the power of its heroes seems unbounded. If Legolas can do anything, it is not an extraordinary feat. The extraordinary must be the inevitable conclusion of constrained circumstances. If the film makers say that there is a caste society which uses gene editing, then there is one.

The conditions which the filmmakers chose, however, have done considerable violence to our understanding of the implications of gene editing. It is false both on the science, and on the implications. First, we do not, in fact, have the ability to radically change people via selecting their genes. Second, and far more importantly, the world in which we do overcome the technical hurdles and substantially improve ourselves is one in which we are simply happier and better off in every way. Their mindset is too zero-sum. They think that the improvement of some would simply lead to them being ranked over others, with no change in the actual condition of the working class. On the contrary, we are already sorted by our condition at birth, and rescued from drudgery solely by technological advancement. Making humans smarter would simply lead to more discoveries and better working conditions. Gattaca appeals to the anxiety of those who have already been born lucky, and who fear that they might be reduced to the status of underlings, when we should not care about who specifically is on the top or the bottom, and care only about what actually advances humanity as a whole. There is no reason to think that it would lead to a caste society, any more than we have a caste society now.

I thought the plot was fine. There is a murder; the police assume it must be the genetically defective person whose eyelash they detect on the premises. This belief is false, but it does lead to our protagonist only narrowly escaping discovery. The murder plot lacked energy compared to the scheme of getting into the spaceflight program while evading detection, and indeed felt like it was simply something to extend the movie long enough to get it to the size of a feature film.

The presence of Gore Vidal in the film was entirely unexpected. He was not bad, but he showed us what great actors do by virtue of him not having it. Great actors are still. They do not do any action that it without purpose. They do not rock onto their heels, or do any of the physical equivalents of hemming and hawing.

All in all, I would give it two stars out of four. I would not rewatch it, and I do not strongly recommend that others watch it either.

The French Connection, on the other hand, is close to a perfect film. At most, its flaws are a couple lines of awkwardly expositional dialogue here or there; otherwise, there is not one choice with which I could quibble. It is a film with many extraordinary scenes. In truth it could be decomposed into a number of short films, each focusing on just one action. Everyone remembers the car chase, of course, which makes you grip the bottom of your seat in the involuntary anticipation of a jarring impact; but there is also the scene where the cops take apart the drug smuggler’s car, or the opening sequence of the nameless detective tailing a French gangster and being murdered upon his return home, or the French gangster being tailed by another detective (our protagonist) and shaking him by an ingenious stratagem in the subway. All of these would be the pinnacle of a lesser director’s career, and yet Friedkin outdoes himself.

I was struck by how totally amoral all of the characters are, not just the villains. “Popeye” Doyle, our protagonist in the police department, is a bad man. In the course of the film, he beats up a random street dealer, conducts numerous illegal searches, is wrong about essentially everything, kills another cop by accident (and then ignores his death in order to rejoin the chase of someone who eventually escapes), is casually racist, and is an alcoholic. Popeye is in it not for the possibility of doing good in the world, but because he enjoys it. He enjoys the pursuit. In truth, as men, I liked the Italian mobsters better, who were all decent young people.

The other feeling I had while watching the film was a profound joy that I live today, and not then. Everything was worse. The cars are worse, the city of New York was worse, the air was filled with cigarette smoke, you couldn’t just read anything you like, airplane tickets were more expensive, crime was higher, and you couldn’t get in contact with anyone. It is possible that we live at the end of halcyon days, before AI takes our purpose (though I’m sure it will compensate us with incredible material goods); but I would like to live either now or in the future, but never in the past.

I cannot recommend the film highly enough. Four stars out of four, and I have watched it twice.